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Unreliable coverage

I tried on both 3G and my home wi-fi network, and though the quality of the stream was fine most of the time, I had repeated messages saying, amongst other things, that I didn’t have enough bandwidth:

This is annoying enough, since everything else (YouTube, iPlayer etc) worked well enough on the same network, but in reloading the player, I ended up back at the start, having to view my allocation of ads again before the football could begin.

In the space of 30 minutes, I viewed about 10 minutes of ads and 20 of football, which means I won’t use ITV Player again if I can help it.

Judging by a quick Twitter search, I’m not the only one who had difficulties last night:

Conclusion

By contrast, I watched the second half of the Netherlands v Denmark game on my iPlayer mobile app on a 3G connection without a single glitch. While the BBC obviously benefits from not having to have ads, there is still much that ITV can learn from its rival.

It needs to make sure the quality of the live stream is high enough to deal with spikes, and work across several devices. Of course, if 3G connections are variable, there’s little ITV can do about that, but in my experience there have been issues even when broadband coverage is excellent.

Then there’s ads. I don’t see why ITV has to make online and mobile viewers watch more ads, and then to insist that these are pre-roll. I’m not sure how ITV measures the impact of these ads, but I’d bet they aren’t very effective.

ITV should be applauded for trying to give its viewers lots of choice on how they view its content, but I fear that many new users attracted by the Euro 2012 coverage will be deterred thanks to a poor user experience.